Robotic glove gives you extra fingers for grabbing

Four fingers and a thumb on each hand is pretty useful. Humans have gone from caves to sprawling cities in part because of our dexterous digits.

But researchers at MIT think we could do even better if we had an upgrade. They have developed a glove with two extra robotic fingers that respond intelligently to your movements, allowing you to perform two-handed tasks with just one robot-enhanced hand.

To develop the glove, Asada and MIT graduate student Faye Wu analyzed the grasping motion of the hand using a special glove fitted with motion-recording sensors. They reduced it to two basic motions: curling your fingers together, and then rotating them to fit an object's shape.

From that research, they developed an algorithm that allows the robotic fingers to respond to data from bending sensors on your human fingers and move to a helpful position. The researchers say it could help elderly people or people with disabilities live independently.

7 Finger Robot

In a video demonstrating the glove, Asada and Wu show the glove assisting in several tasks, including holding a box while your human fingers open the lid, holding a bottle while you unscrew the cap and, perhaps somewhat awkwardly, holding a cup while you stir it.

"Everyday we use various tools. A knife and fork, and then we drive a car. If you use those tools for a long time, you feel that those tools are just an extension of your body. That's exactly what we'd like to do with robotics. You'd have extra fingers, extra arms. If we can control and communicate with them very well, you get to feel that those are just an extension of your body," says Asada in the video.

At the moment the robotic fingers themselves don't flex, which limits their grasping abilities. Additionally, they don't take into account the force of the grasp, which is the next stage of development, according to Wu.

"With an object that looks small but is heavy, or is slippery, the posture would be the same, but the force would be different, so how would it adapt to that? That's the next thing we'll look at," she said.

In future, the fingers might be foldable and only spring out when they're needed, they suggest... which sounds excitingly like "Go, go gadget fingers!" territory.